American Connector Company

Executive Summary: In order to make their plant globally competitive, American Connector Company’s Sunnyvale facility needs to improve on production, process, quality control and inventory control. They should optimize the production line to smoothen the process flow, increase the yield and reduce overall costs. They need to analyse and standardize their product mix. Also, schedule optimization will go a long way to minimize start-up and end costs and to avoid wastage. Work in process inventory needs to be controlled. Quality control measures and checkpoints should be introduced to reduce rejections. Indirect staff for monitoring and production control needs to be minimized to increase the overall productionunits per employee. Also, they should revamp their pricing strategy and implement activity based-costing. Statement of Issues: Sunnyvale would be competing directly with Kawasaki’s high volume / low cost products and faces the possibility of losing lower margin, price sensitive customers. A plant modeled on DJC’s Kawasaki production facility has a tremendous manufacturing advantage over ACC’s Sunnyvale facility. Also, given DJC’s goals strong product quality(1 defect in a million), ACC needs to come up with an action plan to avoid losing their market share to DJC. Criteria: A good criteria for the decision will help in eliminating all the inefficiencies form the process of ACC Sunnyvale plant and will also help them to compete with the competitor if they set up the plant in north America . Analysis DJC Corporation, dedicated to process positioning and robust systems engineering, required that the Kawasaki facility be highly automated. Particular emphasis was placed on what they termed “pre-automation.” DJC’s belief was that a production process could only be fully automated following when the process was fully understood and properly designed. They were concerned that automating a production line too early might result in investing in an